Vonderful VonderRig

It’s been a great few days and I’m so chuffed with the result… granted we haven’t actually pumped it in its final state yet because we don’t want to put unnecessary tensions on the cement but it looks great and I love the VonderRig!

Let me take you through the process of one way of supplying drinking water to a Mozambican village, in this case, Ngogoti.

1) Set up the VonderRig. It’s a lot of equipment to transport but the set up is surprisingly easy. I’m pretty impressed with the design. It works by setting a drill bit with a diameter of about 200mm on the end of long poles and then putting weights ie. people on the drill and rotating it. You can only dig about 50cm at a time before the drill bit fills with mud and you have to lift it all out using a metal cable and then insert the drill again. As you get deeper you have to add more and more poles so that each 50cm section can take up to 40 minutes to complete! We were lucky as we hit water at around 7m of depth (it can sometimes be like 40m!) and we dug down to about 11 eventually. We were trying to get through the gooey sloppy mud (a technical term obviously) to the more sand like stuff below as the water would be cleaner there and the ground more secure. The first picture shows the drilling in action.

2) The second picture shows the group of people from the village plus my team which was 2 “Adeptos” who work for the Diocese, Carlos, the driver who is really good at all the technical stuff – he was our expert cementer! and a technician and assistant from Mandimba who had used the equipment before. Spot the only white person. Spot the only female. O wait, same person…I’ve been challenged this week in my role as a woman and a technical worker in a country where that is so against the norm.


3) When the hole is a desirable depth, a filter must be cut into long plastic tubes where the water will enter and then the tubes lowered into the hole, as seen in picture 3. The base of the pump has also be put over the tube. Gravel is then poured between the tubes and the hole to act as a water filter and to hold the tubes in place.










4) The apron around the pump helps to keep the area clean and to stop pollutants entering the borehole. This was marked out using string and good eyesight! Bricks formed the outside and were used to fill in a hole dug around the base to secure it. This hole was filled with big chunks of gravel in cement and then the whole thing covered with much finer cement.




5) This morning was installing the actual pump – the riser pipes caused some difficulty as as you can see 11 metres of pipe is quite long and the first time we did this our joints didn’t last the stress.













6) We finished the cement job last, and locked the pump so that it can’t be used until the cement has dried and we have put chlorine into the first batch of water. I’m excited about going back and being able to pump water out where there was just ground a week ago and I think the pump looks great.

It’s been a really fun week and I’ve learnt LOADS! I’m also a lot more confident with the Portuguese now and I felt ok leading the team which is such a blessing. I should really be in bed now as I leave tomorrow morning for a couple of weeks to run these pump maintenance training days along the lake shore. I’ll leave you with a cute picture I took whilst helping a team of people peel and pound maize whilst I wasn’t needed at the VonderRig. I got chatting to them all and a couple of days later they invited me to their house and gave me maize to take back to England to show people as I told them we didn’t grow it and that we didn’t eat Nsmina! I didn’t have the heart to tell them that that would be impossible on so many levels so I gratefully accepted the gift!


I tried to explain snow to the guys I was working with this week…”It’s snowing in England.” “I don’t know ‘snow’.” “It’s rain but cold.” “you mean ice”, “no, snow, it’s like rain, only white and very cold.” “yes, ice.” “no, ice is hard, snow is soft. It covers everything with white and you can build men.” (my Portuguese probably confused things at that point!). Luckily Carlos came to my rescue: “ah I have seen it in films and people have big cars and they have to go and take the snow away so that people can drive. Everything turns white.” “yes, exactly, well that’s what they have in England right now.” They didn’t seem as excited as I was! Thinking of you all!